


nothing worsens; nothing grows

by lost_decade



Category: Formula 1 RPF
Genre: Angst, Implied/Referenced Character Death, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-04
Updated: 2017-07-04
Packaged: 2018-11-23 12:01:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 639
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11402016
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lost_decade/pseuds/lost_decade
Summary: It doesn’t seem fair to live on the edge and win only to lose elsewhere.





	nothing worsens; nothing grows

**Author's Note:**

> The beginnings of this was sitting in my drafts for ages and the loss of an old friend made me think of it and pushed me to finish it, short as it is. 
> 
> Title from Someone to Stay by Vancouver Sleep Clinic.

When Nico dreams, he dreams of fire and water, and of the colour red. Not the red of blood, deep and thick, but a bright and shiny cherry red; sheets of metal that float all around, just out of reach. Sometimes he dreams that he's there, part of it, immersed and choking as the water fills his lungs. Other times he's a bystander, on the shore as it all unfolds from a distance, powerless. When he wakes the room seems smaller than it really is, everything more immediate and suffocating.

“Try to go back to sleep,” Vivian whispers, her hand soothing on his back, but he never can. The ocean lurks beyond the window, calm and deceptive in its beauty. He sits in the chair in Alaïa’s room, staring out at it and trying not to think.

There’s a memory that he always comes back to – aged fourteen out by the swimming pool, joking around and pulling each other under the water, legs entangled. He remembers the heat of the stone tiles against his back as he lay down on them, looking up at the cloudless sky. A plane had glinted across the sun, starting its descent to Nice.

“One day I’m gonna have a private jet,” Lewis had said at his side. Their hands had brushed together as the cycle of _one day_ had begun again.

One day they would trade being friends for being champions. One day.

*

There’s a game Nico plays with himself now, tracing back the time and wondering on prevention and cure, trying to pinpoint the moment it all started to sour. So many ifs. It’s enough to drive anyone crazy, trying to unpick the past and rearrange it, rewriting conversations so that they have a different outcome. Probability – he thinks about that one a lot. There’s a deep and cruel irony to the circumstances – they’re men so attuned to danger, accustomed to that shift and quickening of the heart that comes when you’re alone in the cockpit of a Formula One car, the rest of the world shut out. There are so many men who’ve sat in that situation and been dragged from the wreckage a couple of hours later.

Yet planes don’t go down often. It doesn’t seem fair to live on the edge and win only to lose elsewhere.

“You should eat,” Vivian says, “it’s been weeks. You have to eat.”

So Nico eats without tasting, sleeps without resting, wakes exhausted with the knowledge that of all the people in the world when it came down to it, his had been the voice that Lewis wanted to hear.

“Have you considered returning to F1?” a reporter asks at an event he’s attending, “now that your main rival is gone from Mercedes.”

“No,” he says, face contorting with anger as he turns away in disgust, leaving Georg to speak for him.

“You can’t blame yourself,” Georg says to him later, his hand catching Nico’s wrist as he reaches for his glass of vodka.

“I don’t,” Nico replies, “it’s not that.”

It would be easier if it was that. 

*

“What would you have said?” Nico whispers aloud one day, sitting alone out near the water.

He looks down at his phone, scrolling back through the call log until he finds what he's looking for, a familiar number with a little red telephone symbol and a cross next to it, a date he now will never forget even if he tried. He'd seen the call flash up on the screen. It was late and he was tired, too tired for whatever Lewis wanted to say. It was easy to press cancel, to ignore it.

Nico thinks he knows what Lewis would've said, and he'd have said it back too.

He says it aloud now, looking out at the ocean. But no one is listening.  


End file.
